Ellen Messmer who is the writer of the article ‘Social Networks Go To Work’ discusses how the new technologies of social networking, instant messaging and peer to peer file sharing has become a major part of our life in terms of business and personal purposes. She supports his claims by providing statistical numbers from a survey done by Market research firm NewDiligence. The survey shows that 60% of the 527 surveyed IT managers and end users use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube while %85 use media file sharing. It is mentioned that they use those sites during work hours for business and personal purposes.
Another thing that is discussed in the article is security and how safe or dangerous it is to use those sites. It has become a common thing that viruses, spam, malware, and worms spread so easily on these sites because they have very high numbers of users on a daily basis. The information provided by the survey states that half of the respondents access social networking sites at least once a day. The security risks that are spreading were mentioned by Jose Nazario who is a network security researcher at security firm Arbor Networks. "Any social media where you do have a lot of eyeballs is a direct distribution channel for malware," Nazario said.
In order to stay away from those dangers that companies had to face, IT managers started to deploy unified communications plan as corporate policies for network monitoring. This is where enterprises start to play a major role in the business world to stay secure when using instant messaging, Skype, Web conferencing and P2P file sharing.
One example of a company that uses social networking for business purposes is Al Uroush Automotive Trading Company. It is the exclusive BMW Group Importer for Iraq, which is located in Erbil. They have created a fan page on Facebook to keep the people who are interested in BMW in Iraq updated with the latest news they have. They often post pictures of their new arrivals with details about their products. They also make posts about the special offers and the deals that they have in order to attract costumes. The page has 38,389 fans, which means that when they post something, at least half of that number will see it on that same day, which is a great marketing deal.
To see the BMW-Iraq page, click here.
